Elon Musk: Officially a fraud and piece of shit. Official or unofficial war criminal?

[atomheartbevo 89665]

1 hour ago, Wally Fairway said:

Nothing Elon hasn't done before, when Solar City was in deep financial trouble and E and his brother were looking at a huge loss, all of the sudden Tesla's buys Solar City. 

Problem solved

1 hour ago, Humble Beast said:

Exactly.  I’m not saying it’s right, but Elon will do ANYTHING to make this work. He’s done it in the past. Y’all are underestimating that. 

So SpaceX is going to buy Twitter?

[Neonmoon 38129]

7 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

So SpaceX is going to buy Twitter?

Which means the American Public will have funded it?

[Wally Fairway 5549]

7 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

So SpaceX is going to buy Twitter?

Nope - the obv choice is The Boring Company 

Or maybe the one that was selling flamethrowers

 

Edited November 15, 2022 by Wally Fairway

[Francisco 2.0 32392]

https://www.platformer.news/p/elon-only-trusts-elon

 

Quote

On Thursday evening, after a full day of chaos on the timeline, Elon Musk’s Twitter halted new enrollment into its $8-a-month Blue subscription offering. Offering anyone the chance to slap a “verified” badge on their account had led to widespread impersonation of government officials, corporations, and celebrities. The resulting mayhem, which led to memorable hoaxes from accounts misrepresenting themselves as Eli Lilly, Tesla, Lockheed Martin and others, had triggered an advertiser pullout and a general sense that the platform had descended into chaos.

As the significance of all this began to register with Musk, he tweeted that satirical accounts must now include “parody” in both their name and bio. But if any of the fallout had come as a shock to Musk and his team, they can’t say they weren’t warned. 

 

 

Quote

Days before the Nov. 9 launch, the company’s trust and safety team had prepared a seven-page list of recommendations intended to help Musk avoid the most obvious and damaging consequences of his plans for Blue. The document, which was obtained by Platformer, predicts with eerie accuracy some of the events that follow.

“Motivated scammers/bad actors could be willing to pay … to leverage increased amplification to achieve their ends where their upside exceeds the cost,” reads the document’s first recommendation, which the team labeled “P0” to denote a concern in the highest risk category. 

 

Quote

“Impersonation of world leaders, advertisers, brand partners, election officials, and other high profile individuals” represented another P0 risk, the team found. “Legacy verification provides a critical signal in enforcing impersonation rules, the loss of which is likely to lead to an increase in impersonation of high-profile accounts on Twitter.”  

On November 1, when the document was circulated internally, Musk was considering a $99-a-year annual subscription for Blue; only later, after an exchange online with writer Stephen King, did he lower the cost. The move wound up increasing the risk for scams, as the desire to make fun of brands and government officials became an impulse buy at $8.

 

Spoiler

The team also noted removing the verified badge and its related privileges from high-profile users unless they paid, coupled with the heightened impersonation risk, would potentially drive them away from Twitter for good. “Removing privileges and exemptions from legacy verified accounts could cause confusion and loss of trust among high profile users,” they wrote. “We use the health-related protections … to manage against the risk of false-positive actions on high-profile users, under the assumption that the accounts have been heavily vetted. If that signal is deprecated, we run the risk of false positives or the loss of privileges such as higher rate limits resulting in escalation and user flight.” 

The team identified several other risks for which Twitter has yet to identify any solutions. For starters, the company lacks any automated way to remove verified badges from user accounts. “Given that we will have a large amount of legacy verified users on the platform (400K Twitter customers), and that we anticipate we’ll need to debadge a large number of legacy verified accounts  if they decide not to pay for Blue, this will require high operational lift without investment.”

(And this was before the company laid off 80 percent of its contractors, but we’ll get to that.)

The company’s trust and safety team did win support for some solutions, including retaining verification for some high-profile accounts using the “official badge.” 

For the most part, though, the document offers a wish list for features that would make the product safer and easier to use, most of which have not been approved.

It was presented to Esther Crawford, a director of product management at the company who in recent weeks has risen to become one of Musk’s top lieutenants. Musk was briefed as well, sources said, as was his attorney Alex Spiro. And while Crawford appeared sympathetic to many of the concerns in the document, sources said, she declined to implement any suggestions that would delay the launch of Blue. (Crawford did not respond to a request for comment.)

Despite the warnings, the launch proceeded as planned. A few hours later, with the predictions of the trust and safety team largely realized, Musk belatedly stopped the rollout.

II. The contractor wipeout

On Saturday afternoon, a week after an initial round of layoffs had cut Twitter in half, we were the first to report that a second massive wave of cuts had hit the company. This time, the cuts were aimed at Twitter’s contract workers. And on a percentage basis, these losses were even more severe: by the next day, we reported, about 4,400 of 5,500 or so contractors — 80 percent of the team — had lost their jobs.

Functions affected included content moderation, recruiting, ad sales, marketing, and real estate, among others. At the moment, it’s unclear how the loss of what may have been thousands of moderators will affect the service. But it seems clear that Twitter now has dramatically fewer people available to police the site for harmful material.

Unlike Twitter’s full-time employees, who at least got the courtesy of an email informing them that layoffs were coming a night before, contractors received nothing. Neither did their managers, who discovered one by one over the weekend that people they had been counting on to perform critical tasks had suddenly disappeared from the company’s systems. 

“One of my contractors just got deactivated without notice in the middle of making critical changes to our child safety workflows," one manager noted in the company’s Slack channels. This is particularly worrisome because Twitter has for years struggled to adequately police child sexual exploitation material on the platform, as we previously reported. 

Over the course of the day, similar messages trickled in on Blind, an app for coworkers to anonymously discuss their workplaces, and on external Slacks that employees have established to have more candid discussions.

Several workers said they had learned about their employment status after seeing our tweets, attempting to log in to Gmail and Slack, and finding that they no longer had access.

“Found out through your tweet and just happened to check,” one person who worked on content moderation told us. “What a lovely Saturday night.”

Said another, who worked in recruiting: “If I didn’t see your tweet just now, I wouldn’t have even known.” 

Some employees told us that they had been bracing for cuts ever since the layoffs earlier this month. But the abrupt nature of the cuts will likely send many former contractors scrambling: as we were first to report, vendors told them via email their medical benefits would end today, their final day of employment.

Meanwhile, the company’s Slack channels over the weekend told a story of already-low morale finding a new basement.

“I’m wondering when people will realize the value of Twitter was the people that worked here,” one employee said, according to screenshots obtained by Platformer. 

Replied another: “In 2 weeks Twitter has gone from being the most welcoming and healthy workplace I’ve ever known to the most openly hostile and degrading I’ve ever known.”

Employees continue to show a great deal of solidarity among one another. But not to the coterie of volunteer venture capitalists and on-loan engineers from Tesla and the Boring Company that have been carrying out Musk’s orders: those they refer to universally, including on Slack, as “the goons.” 

III. Code freeze

On Monday morning, at around 1:45 AM, Twitter engineers were called into an emergency meeting. A new order had just come down from Musk: freeze all production changes on Twitter systems, effective immediately. 

This was more than just a run-of-the-mill code freeze, during which engineers can commit code but not deploy it. Those are fairly common, and Twitter has been under one for most of the time since Musk took over. Such freezes are generally intended to reduce the chances that a bug disrupts Twitter’s systems. 

This time, however, engineers were told they couldn’t even write any code — “until further notice,” according to an internal email obtained by Platformer. Exceptions will be granted if there is an “urgent change that is needed to resolve an issue with a production service, including any changes reflecting hard promised deadlines for clients,” the email said, and employees get “approval from VP level and Elon explicitly stating that the change needs to be made.” 

On Slack, even engineers who attended the late-night meeting were confused. “Is there a ticket I can reference?” asked an engineer who was being tasked with implementing the freeze. “I don’t see any context.” “We don’t have much context as of now,” a colleague responded. “But this is coming from Elon’s team.”

In the meantime, we’re told engineers are writing code locally, on their laptops, and waiting for the freeze to end.

Meanwhile over the last day, Musk has made several public statements about the quality of Twitter’s code and service that have drawn rebukes from current engineers.

“I’d like to apologize for Twitter being super slow in many countries. App is doing >1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline!” Musk tweeted on Sunday morning, referring to remote procedure calls. Musk also complained about the number of microservices Twitter employs, which are generally understood to prevent the entire site from breaking every time one part of it goes down. 

Engineer Eric Frohnhoefer pushed back on Musk’s criticism, and offered a detailed thread about why Twitter loads more slowly in some places than others. Musk fired him by the end of the day, Bloomberg reported, along with a second engineer who commented on the affair: “As the former tech lead for timelines infrastructure at Twitter, I can confidently say that this man has no idea wtf he’s talking about.”

Another current engineer explained it to us this way:

The fact that he's focusing on performance being worse in certain countries kind of shows that he doesn't know what he's talking about.

If it was an issue with the microservices talking to each other inside of a data center, everyone in the world would have the same crappy experience.

Instead, the experience is not great in India, for example. That's because the payload gets delivered from further away (laws of physics come into effect) and that back-and-forth data transfer between the phone and the data center starts compounding.

Not to mention that places like India have a higher concentration of low power phones that tend to perform worse in general — as opposed to all of our overpowered iPhones and such.

So why the code freeze? No one knows for sure, but some are speculating that Musk has grown paranoid that some disgruntled engineers may intend to sabotage the site on their way out.

IV. Fallout

On Friday, after the disaster of the Blue rollout, Eli Lilly paused all its ad campaigns on Twitter. The move potentially cost Twitter millions of dollars in revenue, according to the Washington Post. (A “verified” fake account impersonating Eli Lilly had said insulin would now be free, and it took Twitter six hours to remove the tweet.) 

The pharmaceutical giant is one of many large companies pulling ad dollars from Twitter in recent days. Companies including Volkswagen and Pfizer have paused their campaigns, and large advertising firms like IPG’s Mediabrands and Omnicom Media Group are advising clients to do the same. 

The news has left Twitter’s ad teams — particularly those responsible for managing ad agency relationships — in a lurch, according to internal screenshots and conversations with current employees. 

“I know that many of your markets and clients are seeing large declines in Q4 and in particular L7D,” wrote Twitter’s global business lead in Slack. “Please add any commentary, questions, issues in this thread and I’ll endeavor to raise as many as possible TY!” 

One employee responded that T-Mobile had requested to “pause the campaigns due to brand safety concerns.” (Three days later, former T-Mobile CEO John Legere asked Elon Musk to let him run Twitter, to which Musk responded simply “no”). 

Another Twitter employee said General Motors had also asked to pause campaigns. “The initial reason they gave is elections, but it looks like an open-ended pause, because the team requested to meet next week to help them make a case to global on why they shouldn’t.” Later, this same employee added: “Pause on [GM] til end of year confirmed and implemented. The reason now is brand safety.”

GroupM, the largest media-buying agency in the world, with $60 billion in annual media spend, told its clients that Twitter was a high-risk media buy, according to Digiday and an email obtained by Platformer. Twitter’s agency partnerships lead explained the situation in Slack: “Given the recent senior departures in key operational areas (specifically Security, Trust & Safety, Compliance), GroupM have updated Twitter’s brand safety guidance to high risk. While they understand that our policies remain in place, they feel that Twitter’s ability to scale and manage infractions at speed is uncertain at this time.”

The employee went on: 

“GroupM will consider lowering the risk grade when the below requirements have been met, which we are working through with leadership:

Return to baseline levels of NSFW / toxic conversation on the platform

Re-population of IT Security, Privacy, Trust & Safety senior staff

Establishment of internal checks & balances

Full transparency on future development plans of community guidelines / content moderation / anything affecting user security or brand safety

Demonstrated commitment of effective content moderation, enforcing current Twitter Rules (e.g. account impersonation, violative content removal timing, intolerance of hate speech and misinformation)”

As with the list of product recommendations prepared by trust and safety for the Blue rollout, advertisers appear to have a better understanding of what Twitter needs than Musk does. Massive cuts to the content moderation team, a paralyzing code freeze, and open hostility between the “goons” and the pre-Musk Tweeps have created a company that continues to court a larger crisis.

Mid-afternoon on Monday, after Musk announced he would begin disconnecting up to 80 percent of unspecified microservices, two-factor authentication temporarily stopped working via SMS. Other users reported noticing partial site outages and difficulty downloading their archives.

There are people who know how to fix all those things, but they either no longer work for the company or have been told not to ship any new code. And the question haunting engineers at the end of the day was not whether any new cracks in the service would emerge, but how many, and when.

 

[Captainant 27667]

The Guardian: Construction workers at Tesla’s Texas gigafactory to sue for labor violations Whistleblowers allege constant hazards, onsite accidents and wage theft while working on the manufacturing facility in Austin

Some excerpts:

Quote

“Nobody deserves what happened in the gigafactory to happen to them, or their family members, or whomever,” Victor, a worker who asked the Guardian to withhold his last name out of fear of retaliation, said in an exclusive interview about working conditions, adding: “I don’t think it was humane.”

...

On Tuesday, Victor is filing a complaint with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha), part of the Department of Labor, over alleged fake certificates of completion for required training he says never happened.

He told the Guardian that his team was directed to work on the metal factory roof at night with no lights, labor on top of turbines that were blowing smoke without protective masks, and otherwise put themselves at risk without basic information on how to stay safe.

In one instance, Victor said he and his colleagues were expected to keep up production on a flooded first floor – despite observing there was live wiring all over the place and cords in the water. He remembers telling his wife: “I’m going to die in this factory.”

On another occasion, Victor worked with a man who was so desperate for money he returned to the job in a brace after breaking his arm on site.

“Every day, there was a safety issue,” he told the Guardian.

Other workers sacrificed time with their loved ones to keep building the factory over Thanksgiving last year but say they never received the double-pay bonuses they had been promised, according to Tuesday’s case referral to the federal Department of Labor’s wage and hour division.

Hope your son isn't getting fucked over by musky, Brat

[atomheartbevo 89665]

1 hour ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

https://www.platformer.news/p/elon-only-trusts-elon

He really is going to destroy Twitter.

[Upgrayedd 5812]

29 minutes ago, Captainant said:

The Guardian: Construction workers at Tesla’s Texas gigafactory to sue for labor violations Whistleblowers allege constant hazards, onsite accidents and wage theft while working on the manufacturing facility in Austin

Some excerpts:

Hope your son isn't getting fucked over by musky, Brat

This is more of an issue for the general contractor IMO

[Captainant 27667]

18 minutes ago, Upgrayedd said:

This is more of an issue for the general contractor IMO

In our great state, we always pass the buck from the powerful site owner who's paying for everything down to the poor worker who's getting his wages stolen. It's that contractors fault for being willing to walk through water with live wires in it (to meet the production target set by the powerful site owner)! 

It's absolutely the responsibility of the site owner to keep the GC honest and not endanger his people. Because at the end of the day, it's your fucking site and you should take personal responsibility for the conditions of it. 

[Pig Bellmont 8718]

 

[Francisco 2.0 32392]

Go take the quiz:

https://newrepublic.com/article/168572/rich-guys-say-the-darndest-things?via=newsletter&source=sourcematerial&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=221114-Confider&utm_term=Confider

 

Quote

The Simpsons’s Mr. Burns and Elon Musk share an eerie number of similarities. Each is the richest person in his respective universe—Springfield for the former, planet Earth for the latter. They boast about their green energy initiatives of electric cars and nuclear power plants, but use their power to advance right-wing politics and fuel their petty personal grievances. Test yourself below to see how well you can separate our cartoonish reality from the world of The Simpsons.

 

 

Quote

“Oppression and harassment are a small price to pay to live in the land of the free.”

• Burns
• Musk

 

And so on.  Go forth.

[Celery Man 20949]

12 hours ago, Humble Beast said:

Exactly.  I’m not saying it’s right, but Elon will do ANYTHING to make this work. He’s done it in the past. Y’all are underestimating that. 
 

 

Does that include ceding control to people who know what they are doing? I don’t think anyone doubts that Elon will do lots of things to achieve his goal, it’s more doubt that Elon doing things will be helpful if the goal is a successful Twitter.

[DigglerontheHoof 21199]

Family, religion, friendship. These are the three demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business.”

✓

Burns

 

 

Musk

 

“If you can take advantage of a situation in some way, it’s your duty as an American to do it.”

✓

Burns

 

 

Musk

 

These are the only two I missed.   I had them as Musk and they're Burns. 83%

Edited November 15, 2022 by DigglerontheHoof

[Francisco 2.0 32392]

 

 

 

[Brisketexan 105139]

4 minutes ago, Celery Man said:

Does that include ceding control to people who know what they are doing? I don’t think anyone doubts that Elon will do lots of things to achieve his goal, it’s more doubt that Elon doing things will be helpful if the goal is a successful Twitter.

Bingo.

The statement is akin to saying "Brisketexan will do ANYTHING to make this 737 depart and arrive on time."  Yeah....I would.  By hiring a good pilot and ground crew, because they know what the fuck they are doing.  What Brisket WOULDN'T do is tell all the pilots and ground crew that Brisket knows better, and GTFO, I'll handle it all.  That would be a recipe for:

 

So...pretty much exactly what's happening to Twitter right now.

[Francisco 2.0 32392]

 

 

[Brisketexan 105139]

1 minute ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

"FREE SPEECH ABSOLUTIST!"

About the only thing that Elon is maximizing at Twitter is hypocrisy.

[NoName 16351]

 

[DigglerontheHoof 21199]

to call Musk a snowflake is an insult to snowflakes.

[Chopper 17235]

On 7/13/2018 at 10:50 PM, MaybeACoordinator said:

Yeah Tesla makes pretty electric cars, but that's an old concept, and when the majors roll out their models, he will be destroyed. His workers say he's a dick who puts them in danger all the time. Still waiting for Space X to accomplish something other than talk. He did nothing more than get underfoot in the Thailand cave rescue, and I've seen dudes light farts with more killing power than that fucking flamethrower of his. And what the blue hell is he doing messing around with crap like that to begin with, if he is Mr Future Buck Rogers Super Genius.

Hyperloop? Lol-loop more like. 

 

The dude is a fraud, and his collapse will make Enron's look like the failure of a barrio raspa stand. 

He fooled us. He made a bunch of money on a pretty simple Internet concept, he has a cool Bond-villain name, and that's about it. 

Shoutout to @MaybeACoordinatorwho gave this thread what is perhaps the most appropriate title in the history of surly or tos.

16 hours ago, Humble Beast said:

Y’all underestimate Elon’s ability to leverage everything at his disposal and blur the lines to accomplish what he wants.  “funding secured”

Elmo has already sunk $54B into twitter and it's cost him a lot on the tesla side as he's had to sell tesla stock in order to fund his twitter purchase. There's no way he's going to be able to continue to fund twitter that way. On the spacex side, from all reports that business has done well because he hired a ceo who knows what they're doing and he's almost completely stayed out of her way. If he starts to sink the value of that business by selling off stock or otherwise interfering, he'd be taking on even more risk.

Also by showing how erratic, unlikeable and unreliable he is personally, I think he's hindered the potential of Tesla to appeal to new customers right at the time it's facing new, strong competition across the spectrum. He's also tied himself closely to the Saudis and China which are both very odd partners in 2022, and risky, desperate strategies.

[wildcat09 29354]

14 hours ago, Humble Beast said:

Exactly.  I’m not saying it’s right, but Elon will do ANYTHING to make this work. He’s done it in the past. Y’all are underestimating that. 
 

 

This is the kind of shit people say as a positive about people like Sam Bankman-Fried. It's the biggest possible clue that the person saying it is a bootlicking idiot whose recommendations will at the very least cost you money and in certain circumstances might lead you to prison.

[wildcat09 29354]

14 hours ago, F250 said:

Back in the day, I used to pull that shit when it was a normal practice in the industry. I once went to work at 6 AM on a Monday and didn't stop until 4 PM on Tuesday. Before I left for the day, I wrote an incident report from all the notes I had been collecting over the previous two days.

LOL that thing was complete jibberish. It made no sense, it was as if someone tried to write a technical document after downing a bottle of vodka and a sheet of acid. People were shedding tears from laughing when they read it out loud when I returned. Lots of "ask fuckity fuck, oranges, and months of the year" typed into metric fields.

I was in my mid-twenties, Elon is fucking 51 years old having a manic episode that's been going on for days. That freak is probably saying some bat shit crazy things over at Twitter HQ at the moment.

Soon he is going to Tweet out "Maybe having an annual purge is a good idea, it would reduce unemployment."

 

The thing is, Elon's "work" mostly consists of trawling Twitter for employees to fire and half-cocked ideas to demand his remaining workforce effectuate in mere days, with numerous breaks to play Elden Ring or the new God of War in between. It's not what anyone who has ever done a real day's work in their life would consider work. He's hanging out in Kyle Rittenhouse's fucking mentions for christ's sake, he's not doing anything productive.

[F250 28774]

3 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

The thing is, Elon's "work" mostly consists of trawling Twitter for employees to fire and half-cocked ideas to demand his remaining workforce effectuate in mere days, with numerous breaks to play Elden Ring or the new God of War in between. It's not what anyone who has ever done a real day's work in their life would consider work. He's hanging out in Kyle Rittenhouse's fucking mentions for christ's sake, he's not doing anything productive.

Oh, I have no doubt he is just fucking around all day and night while hopped up on his own brain chemistry.

[Captainant 27667]

It can't be that Elmo is firing people for disagreeing and punishing users for posting things he doesn't like! What about all that free speech we've heard so much about from @Cornpop and @workswithseed??

[Chopper 17235]

9 minutes ago, Captainant said:

It can't be that Elmo is firing people for disagreeing and punishing users for posting things he doesn't like! What about all that free speech we've heard so much about from @Cornpop and @workswithseed??

 

[Bateshorn 9927]

1 hour ago, Chopper said:

Shoutout to @MaybeACoordinatorwho gave this thread what is perhaps the most appropriate title in the history of surly or tos.

Elmo has already sunk $54B into twitter and it's cost him a lot on the tesla side as he's had to sell tesla stock in order to fund his twitter purchase. There's no way he's going to be able to continue to fund twitter that way. On the spacex side, from all reports that business has done well because he hired a ceo who knows what they're doing and he's almost completely stayed out of her way. If he starts to sink the value of that business by selling off stock or otherwise interfering, he'd be taking on even more risk.

Also by showing how erratic, unlikeable and unreliable he is personally, I think he's hindered the potential of Tesla to appeal to new customers right at the time it's facing new, strong competition across the spectrum. He's also tied himself closely to the Saudis and China which are both very odd partners in 2022, and risky, desperate strategies.

He got margin called.  Dudes as rich as he is don't get margin called.  They just move the debt to somebody else who happily takes it. That tells you exactly what banks think about him.

[Brian Fantana 6687]

He really is the world's most fragile man

[Chopper 17235]

 

 

[Chopper 17235]

 

[Homercles 10205]

Elon confidently tweeting about remote procure calls, micro services, serial requests and all the other examples where he’s publicly proven wrong…

[Chopper 17235]

 

[mchookem 16335]

[Chopper 17235]

On this one he gets owned, engages with a fascist account and doesn't comprehend any of it

 

[Brisketexan 105139]

46 minutes ago, Captainant said:

It can't be that Elmo is firing people for disagreeing and punishing users for posting things he doesn't like! What about all that free speech we've heard so much about from @Cornpop and @workswithseed??

Boy, it just keeps stacking up at breakneck speed, don't it?

Look, I know -- from experience -- about stacking multiple stupid mistakes one on top of the other in short order, and looking like an absolute ass/moron while doing so.  In college, I behaved exactly as you would have expected.  But I was an overachiever, and took it to 11 on occasion.

On my worst day....I didn't shit the bed with even 10% of the frequency Elon has done since taking over Twitter.  His ability to continue to self-own is apparently limitless and again, it's FASCINATING to watch.  And it's almost that fascinating to watch his fanboys continue to stan for him.  Truly, there's no amount of shooting his own dick clean off that his fans wouldn't praise as secret genius.  You know, like the 4D chess we heard about a while back.

[SydneyCarton 48105]

26 minutes ago, Brian Fantana said:

He really is the world's most fragile man

Donald Trump, dude. Donald Trump still exists. 

[MeerkatBong 115]

51 minutes ago, Captainant said:

It can't be that Elmo is firing people for disagreeing and punishing users for posting things he doesn't like! What about all that free speech we've heard so much about from @Cornpop and @workswithseed??

Is Elmo your nickname for Elon? Just catching up on this thread.

[NoName 16351]

there are assholes, then there is Elon Musk

lol

[MeerkatBong 115]

2 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

Boy, it just keeps stacking up at breakneck speed, don't it?

Look, I know -- from experience -- about stacking multiple stupid mistakes one on top of the other in short order, and looking like an absolute ass/moron while doing so.  In college, I behaved exactly as you would have expected.  But I was an overachiever, and took it to 11 on occasion.

On my worst day....I didn't shit the bed with even 10% of the frequency Elon has done since taking over Twitter.  His ability to continue to self-own is apparently limitless and again, it's FASCINATING to watch.  And it's almost that fascinating to watch his fanboys continue to stan for him.  Truly, there's no amount of shooting his own dick clean off that his fans wouldn't praise as secret genius.  You know, like the 4D chess we heard about a while back.

I agree with everything you have said about Elon and especially what he's done the past...checks notes...2 weeks only? Sheesh.

But, if I were a betting man, I wouldn't count ole "Elmo" out. I think there are decent odds that somehow, someway, he bounces out of this mess to get back to even (or even growth/better). The guy seems to have sold his soul for the midas touch with this stuff.

But then again, it could be he finally flew too close to the sun on wings made of a blue bird logo.

[wildcat09 29354]

Elon is now hanging out in the replies of an account that helped coordinate violent threats against hospitals.

He's definitely working hard.

[Chopper 17235]

2 minutes ago, MeerkatBong said:

Is Elmo your nickname for Elon? Just catching up on this thread.

He's known interchangeably as elmo, el*n, elo, fucktard, dickwad and probably a lot of other names. His fascist friends refer to him as their African American hero.

[MeerkatBong 115]

4 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

Donald Trump, dude. Donald Trump still exists. 

Also poor Kanye West who if you touched with a feather would collapse like a house of cards.

Now that I'm thinking about it:

Kanye

Trump

Elon

All having their comeuppance and time in the barrel, one after another, very publicly. The tide appears to be turning. If you are a public or celebrity provocateur, you might take notes, read the room, and go in hiding for a bit if you want to stay solvent. 

[Brisketexan 105139]

5 minutes ago, MeerkatBong said:

I think there are decent odds that somehow, someway, he bounces out of this mess to get back to even (or even growth/better).

Businesses are about revenue.

Twitter was ALREADY on the edge when it came to revenue.  Its chief source of revenue is advertisers.  Who are attracted by a particular type of users who frequent a stable and known platform.

Now, those advertisers are shutting down their spending.  The type of users they want to reach are in doubt as far as staying users.  The platform is unstable, both technically and in terms of content/moderation.  Nothing is known.  Nobody knows what Twitter will look like tomorrow, or even an hour from now -- not even Elon, who is "governing" based on juvenile impulses.

Tell me the vision for Twitter having sufficient revenue....as it services massive debt....and has surely already lost the majority of the value he paid for the company.  "He's got a magic touch" doesn't get you there.

[Chopper 17235]

12 minutes ago, MeerkatBong said:

But, if I were a betting man, I wouldn't count ole "Elmo" out. I think there are decent odds that somehow, someway, he bounces out of this mess to get back to even (or even growth/better). The guy seems to have sold his soul for the midas touch with this stuff.

But then again, it could be he finally flew too close to the sun on wings made of a blue bird logo.

Twitter doesn't have the upside to justify what anywhere near what he paid for it. It's not going to turn into a successful video site, nor one for influencers, nor is he going to find anywhere near 15 million annual subscribers at even his reduced price of $8 per month. His shitposting is only making things worse because it'll keep away the advertisers who've already paused/abandoned his site in droves.

edit @Brisketexan beat me to it

Edited November 15, 2022 by Chopper

[MeerkatBong 115]

1 minute ago, Brisketexan said:

Businesses are about revenue.

Twitter was ALREADY on the edge when it came to revenue.  Its chief source of revenue is advertisers.  Who are attracted by a particular type of users who frequent a stable and known platform.

Now, those advertisers are shutting down their spending.  The type of users they want to reach are in doubt as far as staying users.  The platform is unstable, both technically and in terms of content/moderation.  Nothing is known.  Nobody knows what Twitter will look like tomorrow, or even an hour from now -- not even Elon, who is "governing" based on juvenile impulses.

Tell me the vision for Twitter having sufficient revenue....as it services massive debt....and has surely already lost the majority of the value he paid for the company.  "He's got a magic touch" doesn't get you there.

Yep-- I agree, he's torched a ton of money (Twitter's, Tesla's, his own) in the short term.

I'm talking long term and in a vague, crazy way in the same way we talk about how some quarterbacks just always seem to evade the sack. But to your point again, there are good odds that the damage he's done and will continue to do will be beyond repair, as well.

This is what makes it a fascinating story to watch. If ever there was an appropriate time to characterize something as a train-wreck that you can't stop watching and morbidly curious how it all plays out, I think this is one of those times.

[Nivek 16929]

This is exactly the type of business man leadership we need in the White House.  Musk-Trump 2024!

[Francisco 2.0 32392]

 

 

[aggie08 21504]

37 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

Elon is now hanging out in the replies of an account that helped coordinate violent threats against hospitals.

He's definitely working hard.

Elon spreading the message of 'libs of TikTok' to a much broader audience. There's that free speech that everyone seemed to be excited about! What's up, freedom?

[GenXer 2877]

36 minutes ago, Chopper said:

He's known interchangeably as elmo, el*n, elo, fucktard, dickwad and probably a lot of other names. His fascist friends refer to him as their African American hero.

I saw him referred to as Enron in a tweet about the twitter fiasco. That made me chuckle.

[Captainant 27667]

11 minutes ago, aggie08 said:

Elon spreading the message of 'libs of TikTok' to a much broader audience. There's that free speech that everyone seemed to be excited about! What's up, freedom?

uhg I had forgotten about that dumb fucking page and how much workswithseed and our brother deacon in christ sacky john loved it

Edited November 15, 2022 by Captainant

[atomheartbevo 89665]

3 hours ago, DigglerontheHoof said:

to call Musk a snowflake is an insult to snowflakes.

2 hours ago, Brian Fantana said:

He really is the world's most fragile man

We know he was thin-skinned, but he’s definitely taking it to new heights.

You'd think the world’s richest man would have more self-confidence and a stronger ego, not act like some 30-something who flamed out at life, and manages a McDonalds staffed by teens, and takes out his frustration by trying to keep up on what the employees think of him.

And he apparently thinks Twitter is a McDonald’s, where new employees can easily be brought in.

I’ve never seen a company completely destroy their institutional knowledge.

And being this insecure and this erratic means even more advertisers are going to bail.

We should start a pool on how long I takes before something major breaks (besides Elon’s ego).

[Brisketexan 105139]

1 hour ago, Nivek said:

This is exactly the type of business man leadership we need in the White House.  Musk-Trump 2024!